Tag Archives: Prose Poetry

Today’s prompt is “Silence.” I originally wrote the piece below well over a year ago. But it fits the prompt so perfectly that I am giving it a second airing.

THE SONG OF SILENCE

My fingers touched the keys of silence, and I played its song. It pulled from me a longing that I thought was gone forever – the yearning to release my soul in flowing words that birth new life in images and sounds that intertwine and reach another soul and draw it close to mine.

I feared my well was dry, my soul an empty sieve, and that I’d never again know a yearning to create with words that live.

Ah … now … the peace, the solace that replaces fear. For now I know I have it still – the gift to make words living things. All it took was spending time with silence for a…

a flake for each boy ive parted my lips for. making room for their pride and spitting out my dignity. swallowing every notion they give to me, as meaningless and spiteful as they sounded i absorbed them. played them back in my head a thousand times. opened my mouth to return the favor, but my words bounced right back. as if it never mattered.

a sliver.

a sliver for the boy in the blue vest, eyeing me from across the room. telling me im beautiful. more beautiful than my friends. more beautiful than his ex. more beautiful than my ex deserved. thats the part that won me. but in his head hes silently plotting the makings of an unmade bed. tussled from his satisfaction and smothered with my emptiness. his teeth are clenched because even though im beautiful, hes forgotten my name.

While sitting in a booth, an hour before work, I try to write poetry. But the click, click, click of the cash register distracts the musings jammed into my already clustered brain. And as I try to spill words onto this page, a you child spills her soda, the tawny liquid cascades the patterns of her too-tight T-shirt and falls to the floor ~~ the floor I will mop and mop over again, as sticky footprints retrace the night’s events. And the man, a cigar dangling from the sepia corner of his tightly clinched mouth, growls the angered growl of a wounded bear, bearing all to me and the child who hides behind her mother’s saffron sundress. And in the child’s shame, she raises two, too-large coca cola eyes to meet mine, and then lowers them as a tear trails the shadows of her sanguine face.